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Monthly Archives: October 2014

Europeana Creative explores new ways to engage with Europe’s digital cultural heritage for business, education and entertainment. It seeks creative entrepreneurs to push Europe’s rich cultural heritage into the new media era. Europeana Creative develops innovative applications that are focused on education, tourism, social networks and design. In open innovation challenge events, developers, creative entrepreneurs and cultural heritage experts meet to identify, incubate and spin off viable projects. Europeana Creative has 26 partners from 14 EU member states and is coordinated by the Austrian National Library.

On 23 September the finalists of the Europeana Creative 2nd Challenge were invited to the innovative Mobile World Centre in Barcelona to pitch their concepts and ideas at the Apps&Cultura Demo Party. This time the winners are from Estonia and The Netherlands, and include everything from fun games to play with your family outdoors to geo tagging, augmented reality and re-photography!

Timepatch, Estonia

Timepatch (currently using brand in Estonian — Ajapaik) is a crowdsourcing application for organizing historic view photographs geographically or otherwise and collecting rephotographs. The crowdsourced data is socially validated and for bigger engagement the process itself is gamified.

“We want to become the most efficient tool for harvesting location metadata for historic photographs from public and private collections”, says Vahur Puik, leader of the project.

Buitenplaats Mobiel, The Netherlands

Buitenplaats Mobiel is a hybrid, location based game which can be played either with a smartphone or a tablet. It has two important parts: a digital online platform and location-based ‘mini-games’. The used location-based technology is BEACON. The inspiration comes from the region Kennemerland, where there are a lot of buitenplaats – a summer residence for rich townspeople in the Netherlands. During the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century the region Kennemerland became very popular among people from Amsterdam and so the buitenplaatsen in this area have shared history, but also have their own unique stories to tell. By playing the game families can explore, experience and discover these beautiful heritage sites and their intriguing life stories.

In the words of Jennemie Stoelhorst, Leader of the project, “these sites are unlocked in a contemporary and interactive way using modern technology”. Lost heritage (both tangible and intangible) is visualized again.

Europeana Creative congratulates the winners and is looking forward to the future collaboration!

And don’t worry if you missed this chance! We will soon open our final Challenge in the category of Design!